


My Friend, the Reaper

by thesilverdoe



Category: Original Work
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Death, F/M, Fantasy, Other, Romance, Short Story, Supernatural - Freeform, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 04:54:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17860682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverdoe/pseuds/thesilverdoe
Summary: The Grim Reaper transports you when you die. But when Lorelei dies, she comes back... and then dies again. Maybe she's immortal, or maybe she's just got terrible luck.My first short story for my creative writing class I'm in. I'm kind of proud of this, and thought I would share it online.





	My Friend, the Reaper

 

The first time I died, I was thirteen years old. On the way home from school one afternoon, my uncle Jordan was driving me. We had just passed the park, nearly home, when we were hit by another driver who had lost control. The car had come out of nowhere, and it was too late for uncle Jordan to react by the time we saw the vehicle hurtling towards us. My uncle had come out of the accident relatively unscathed with just a sore shoulder. I, however, had been pinned between my seat and the other car, and my injuries were so bad that I bled out. I died just as the ambulance had reached hospital. And when I died, I was transported somewhere; not heaven, not hell. Just a kind of… nothing. A space between space.

It was a kind of hallway, a long hallway that didn’t seem to have a start or end, no windows, no furniture or decorations, no doors that branched off into side corridors with rooms to explore. It had no details to speak of; it was just a white hallway, so white that it hurt my eyes to look at, as if it was constructed out of light. Upon arrival at this place, I was confused, lost. How did I get here? It took me several moments to retrace my steps, the last thing I remembered was in the passenger seat of Jordan’s brand-new car, and then a feeling of panic as the other car approached us without stopping. As I put the pieces together I knew that I must be dead, but I didn’t want to believe it, at such a young age it was too overwhelming to comprehend.

As I look at my surroundings -- which weren’t really surroundings at all -- I turned around, my attention turning to the hallway that stretched in the other direction. And standing at that end of the hallway was a black figure, the only thing in the room that contradicted the light that enveloped everything. The figure, in the shape of a human, gave me a sense of relief; they could help me by telling me where I was, so I ran to my only promise of security amongst this strange place. And as I approached, the figure appeared less and less human. Their silhouette was not defined, it wavered, flickered like smoke, or a computer screen glitching. It was just a trick of the light, I told myself, and kept running, and when I finally reached it, it turned around. And to my horror, it wasn’t human – not at all. The man, woman, whatever it was, was nothing, just like the room it inhabited. But instead of a white nothingness, it was a black nothingness. It turned around to look at me, and I stared into where its face would have been, and I screamed, and tore away from it as fast as humanly possible.

And in the midst of my adrenaline-filled escape, the room was gone, and somehow I was back in the hospital, weak, but alive. My mother called it a miracle. She called both of my first two deaths miracles for surviving them. Maybe it was.

I resolved not to tell anyone about my experience, partly because I was sure no one would believe me, and because I hoped to forget that ghostlike being that haunted me as a teenager. But as time passed, and the memories of that strange place faded and I began to wonder if I had really experienced them at all – I died again. This was when I was sixteen and I had contracted a case of pneumonia so nasty that I had landed myself in the hospital once again. Upon my death, I was transported to the same place I had been taken three years prior. It was exactly the same, and the figure that I saw before was not there. Instead, I was greeted by a young man somewhere in his mid-twenties. He greeted me kindly.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“It’s hard to explain,” the man answered.

“But I’m dead, right?”

“Yes, you’re dead,” the man said after a moment’s hesitation. “I apologize for what happened when you came here the first time, I didn’t know you were coming.”

The first time…? “Wait, you mean. That – thing I saw, that was you?”

He nodded. “I didn’t realize you were coming last time because, well, I didn’t expect you to die so early. I transform to look human so when I’m transporting humans to the afterlife they don’t freak out.”

I folded my arms. “So… you’re, what, the grim reaper?”

“Essentially,” he said with a slight tilt of his head. “If that’s what you want to call me.”

“Oh,” I unfolded my arms. There was a moment of silence as I gathered my thoughts. “So… you killed me?”

“No,” he smiled, shaking his head. “I don’t kill people, I just guide them to the afterlife. The skull and scythe are also an exaggeration, I don’t know where that idea came from.”

“And the grim reaper uses the phrase ‘freak out’?” I joked.

“I’ve transported many teenagers in my existence.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that. We talked for a little longer, him answering my questions as best he could. He explained to me that he didn’t expect me to die so soon that day three years ago, and he was surprised even now that I was here again at such a young age. And in the middle of another one of my questions, before I had even finished asking it, I was back on Earth and alive. So, while I still had a hundred unanswered questions, I pushed them aside to cry with and hug my overjoyed family; my mother, father, and my three brothers, at my unexplainable survival.

Every time I died, it would only be for a few minutes, sometimes even seconds in the human realm, and then I would be revived. But time passed differently in the place I went when I was dead, like it does in dreams. I’m not sure how many times I died and came back throughout my life, but every single time I was welcomed by the grim reaper.

The third time I revisited that place I was in my twenties, and my cause of death being a murder. I wasn’t the target, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, it wasn’t really a murder since I came back.

When I arrived, I was once again greeted by the grim reaper. I asked him what he preferred to be called. His answer to that was since he is not human, he had no particular preference. I resolved to calling him Cecil, the name of my best friend in elementary school before my family moved to a different city, but I didn’t tell him that. And maybe it’s not the best, or most-fitting name for an otherworldly being, but it was better than calling him ‘the grim reaper’. Too impersonal, and frankly just weird.

So he greeted me, my third death in life so far. Soon after greeting me we laughed at my luck, or lack of it, and at the same time we were both incredibly puzzled, trying to figure out why this was happening to me.

“I’ve encountered people before who have died and are brought back to life, but those people are brought back by doctors. You seem to come back on your own somehow. And so many times. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Cecil said.

“I just keep thinking that there’s someone or something who wants me dead but it’s not working out.”

He chuckled. “How have you been?” he asked like we were old friends catching up during coffee. “It’s been a few years.”

I told him about my new job, and how my family was doing. As for him, everything was the same, I mean, guiding people to the next life was kind of his only purpose in the universe. I couldn’t even fathom how lonely that must be.

I’m not sure how many more times we met throughout my life – er, deaths. At some point he decided to give his strange little pocket of the universe a look to it whenever I came along. Apparently, his white room of nothing only looked like that when he was alone, and the times I arrived were times when he was not expecting anyone. So even though he was not escorting me to the afterlife, he thought it would be better suited to at least give his guest something to look at whilst there.

Once it was a nice little apartment, with windows, a kitchen, and a little couch in front of a TV.

“Does the TV actually work?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

Another time he made it appear as a beach with the waves coming in at low tide. At first, I believed it, the sand caved under our feet when we stepped on it, the sound of the waves crashing and gulls squawing made it very convincing. Then at some point I realized there was no smell of the sea salt, and even though a sun was looking down at us, I felt no warmth on my face. It was a beautiful façade, but I applauded him for how well it was done, even if all the details could not be carried out.

“So what is it like, meeting all these dead people, talking them, and then never seeing them again? Do you…” I paused, unsure how to phrase my question, and wondered if maybe it was offensive somehow.

“Do I what?” Cecil asked.

“Do you have a family? Were you born?”

He shook his head. “No. One day I appeared, fully formed, fully conscious and independent, and I instantly knew what purpose I existed for.”

I pursed my lips. He just accepted this as his life, seeing all these dead people and never getting to form a real relationship with any of them? Upon his explanation, I looked into his face, the face of the young man he had taken the guise of each time I met him after the first. His eyes, while full of wisdom and age, also contained loneliness. Even if he was not human, he’d seen the human experience billions of times over; seen them grow, adapt, learn, love, and of all these people he briefly met, he hadn’t formed a true connection with a single one of them because he wasn’t supposed to, or allowed to?

“And you’re just okay with that?” Tears began to sting my eyes.

“No. No, of course I’m not,” he replied, placing his hands on my shoulders, then retreating them as soon as he realized his actions. “But I can’t make someone stay here with me. They all eventually cross to the other side. I can’t leave, either, believe me.”

“What if I stayed with you?”

“You wouldn’t want that, Lorelei.”

“It’s my choice, isn’t it?” I clasped one of his hands in mine. His eyes wandered from mine down to where our hands connected. I thought he might pull away from me again, but instead he placed his free hand on top of mine. He seemed to want to say something, and I looked into his eyes, nearly seeing the gears turning in his head, waiting for him to say it. His mouth opened, and he sucked in a breath of air, the beginning of a formation of a sentence, and then he closed his mouth again. Whatever he might have wanted to say, he wasn’t going to say it now.

“You’re right. It is your choice.”

My heart sank a little. I wanted to argue that he needed someone to keep him company, that we obviously cared about each other. I wanted to, but instead I kept my mouth shut.

Soon after, I was revived again, not even relieved that I was alive. Just disappointed, and I held that disappointment within me, and I wouldn’t know how long that would be until I died again. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I killed myself -- not in a suicidal way, just to go back and argue with Cecil and coax that thought out of him, that thing we both wanted him to say but didn’t. But if I killed myself voluntarily would I come back?

I soon realized how crazy I sounded. Of course, I wouldn’t commit suicide just to resolve our conversation. But when was the next time I was going to see him? For all I knew it could be tomorrow or fifty years from now.

But as life went on I became disenchanted with it; I held that disappointment in me, but also a kind of unnatural, maybe unhealthy hope. On Earth, I had my family, I had a job, I had friends, but always somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered: how was Cecil doing right now?

I didn’t see him again until I was forty.

As always, Cecil greeted me. I pulled him into a hug. He hugged me back. I considered continuing our conversation from twenty years ago, but with our time together being unknowable, I decided against it. I told him that I missed him, and after a pause, much like the one from twenty years ago, he told me he had missed me as well.

When I pulled back from the hug, I realized he still had the face of the man he had chosen to show himself as, but he was no longer young. A few wrinkles had appeared here or there. In fact, I would say he looked about the age I was. For a timeless being that could transform his world around him and his own self, why not just look young forever? I would. But though I was curious, again, I chose not to ask.

“I wondered while you gone that maybe you’re some kind of immortal,” he said to me as we spoke. For this visit, he had made the space appear as a park, with a children’s playground behind us. We sat at a picnic bench as we talked.

“Nah,” I shook my head. “I mean if I am immortal, whoever made me so did a really shoddy job of it.”

“I’ve never met a human so bad at staying alive _and_ staying dead.”

“Well, it’s not so bad,” I replied. “I get to see you.”

“Yes... I just wish we had more time. And if you aren’t immortal, I wonder when you will die permanently. It’ll be our last time together.” He wrung his hands and looked at the trees as he said this instead of me.

“Cecil,” I said, putting my hand atop his. “When I really die, I’m staying.”

He turned his head back to me, his eyes meeting mine, and he smiled. “I would like that.”

Throughout my life I had died a little over half a dozen times, and each of these times I was transported to some sort of in-between afterlife, greeted by my best friend, and soulmate. And as I grew older, he did too. I finally ended up dying, really dying, at the age of fifty-nine due to unknown causes. That was the official verdict, anyway. No sickness, or car accident, or anything like that. I was positive it just was because my body couldn’t take it anymore, cheating death like that; it’s not natural.

Though Cecil and I had many theories as to what was killing me, and why I was being brought back, we never settled on an answer. Perhaps we weren’t meant to know. And when I arrived one last time in this strange universe that could be nothing or anything at his command, he welcomed me with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“So, the immortality theory is out the window,” I said.

“How do you know you’re really dead this time?” Cecil asked, his thumb tracing my upper forearm as we stood in a half-embrace.

“I just know. And I’m staying.”

While I knew Cecil was happy upon me staying with him, he told me that I could depart to the afterlife should I ever wish it. But I didn’t want to, and while I was curious, of course, about what was on the other side, that didn’t matter. Instead, with Cecil, I met all the people he met, and we guided them to the afterlife together.


End file.
